A big story in today's news cycle is the CIA and a supposed dropped ball.

At the longtime CIA media outpost Newsweek, Jeff Stein wants you to know
Nouri bega,n spying on and tracking the CIA in 2004. If true, not
surprising. Supposedly, he was fed info by the Iranian government and
fed back to them. If true, the notion that the White House installed
Nouri in 2006 and demanded he remained prime minister in 2010 makes both
Bully Boy Bush and Barack Obama look even more stupid for supporting
Nouri. Stein writes:

According to [former CIA official John] Maguire and another former CIA
operations officer, the Iraqis acquired sophisticated cell phone
monitoring equipment, probably from Iran, and began tracking CIA
operators to identify their spies, especially inside the Maliki
government. “It wasn’t so much the agency people they were interested in
as who they were meeting and talking to,” says another CIA source, a
paramilitary operations specialist who did three tours in Iraq. Although
he was not authorized to discuss the subject, he agreed to be quoted on
condition of anonymity because he felt U.S. advisers just arriving in
Iraq needed to be warned.

“They are very aggressive,” he says of the Iraqi security
services. “They have the best equipment Iran has,” including devices
known as StingRays, that can lock onto a cell phone and extract all its data, from contacts to photos and music.

AP's Ken Dilianianap speaks
to CIA spokesperson Dean Boyd who states that "the intelligence
community provided plenty of warning to
the Obama administration that the insurgent Islamic State in Iraq and
Levant --known as ISIL -- could move on Iraqi cities" and Dilianianap
quotes US House Rep Mike Roger (House Intelligence Committee Chair)
stating, "Anyone who
has had access to and actually read the full extent of CIA intelligence
products on ISIL and Iraq should not have been surprised by the current
situation."

Dean Boyd is offended by any suggestion that the CIA in Iraq since 2011
have just been sitting behind desks or hiding out. They've done much
more than that and I'm not being sarcastic. We've noted here at least
three different times when drones were spotted flying over Baghdad. I'm
sure they've done many other missions as well. In addition, they do
have the outpost on the Turkish border which allows them fly drones over
Iraq and Iran and that's also where most communications -- in Iraq and
Iran -- are monitored from.

Nouri is said to have purged the CIA assets in Iraq. That's also not
'news.' The Iraqi press has noted repeatedly in the last two years --
especially Kitabat and Iraq Times -- that this or that official was run
off (and often run out of the country) by Nouri who was accusing the
official (usually a general) of being a spy for the United States.

All of this was known or should have been. Did the CIA 'fail' the administration?

The previous administration? Possibly. (If they did, they did so by
bending to the will of the Bully Boy Bush White House.) The current
administration? No.

Let's again note that Jaime Dettmer (Daily Beast) reported earlier this week that the White House had months of warnings about ISIS and the warnings were
ignored. And who's talking about this? Dettmer reports:

The prime minister of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, Nechirvan
Barzani, says he warned Baghdad and the United States months ago about
the threat ISIS posed to Iraq and the group’s plan to launch an
insurgency across Iraq. The Kurds even offered to participate in a joint
military operation with Baghdad against the jihadists.Washington
didn’t respond—a claim that will fuel Republican charges that the Obama
administration has been dangerously disengaged from the Middle East.
Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki dismissed the warnings, saying everything
was under control.The Kurds’ intelligence head, Lahur Talabani,
says he handed Washington and London detailed reports about the
unfolding threat. The warnings “fell on deaf ears,” he says.

There were warnings. In addition, common sense told anyone paying
attention this was coming. hWe warned here repeatedly that when people
were told they could make changes by votes and their votes were
overturned (by the White House in 2010), when those politicians who
tried to represent them were targeted by the government, what was left?
The only avenue for redress was protest. And Nouri labeled the
protesters 'terrorists' and attacked them. And where was the US?

The current events are no surprise at all. As Dexter Filkins told Terry Gross (Fresh Air, NPR, link is audio and text) yesterday, "Well, you know, it's pretty depressing (laughing). I mean, these guys
are - I mean, some of those guys, you know, ISIS are just full on
psychopaths. You know, these are the people that make beheading videos.
It's not all of them. But there's a lot of them in there. And, you know,
it's sad. I mean, it's not terribly surprising I have to say. You know,
I was there a few months ago and it wasn't difficult to see what was
happening. You know, I didn't - I certainly didn't predict what would
ultimately happen. But everything was really fragile, there was so much
anger and unhappiness that it looked like, you know, we're kind of one
big event away from everything coming apart. It wasn't hard to see."

What this is about is that the Blame Bully Boy Bush for problems that
emerged from 2009 to the present day is wearing thin so the White House
is attempting to push the blame over to the CIA and the CIA is saying,
"Oh, no, we're not going to be your fall guy." It's an internal
squabble, a game of hot potato.

This week's. Black Agenda Radio, hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey (first airs each Monday at 4:00 pm EST on the Progressive Radio Network),
features a discussion of the CIA's involvement in Iraq with Bill of
Rights Defense Committee's executive director Shahid Buttar.

Glen Ford: The NSA -- the National Security Agency which purports to
be the all seeing eyes and the all hearing ears of the United States,
how could the NSA not have known that ISIS -- the jihadist group which
US funding has been so much a part of the growth of -- was not about to
launch a major offensive or be the spearhead of a major offensive in
Iraq? Shahid Buttar: The CIA has a long history of being on both sides of
conflicts and instigating conflicts which we then later sacrifice a
great deal to address. And there's any number of places we could
demonstrate this from [. . .] Saddam Hussein -- which the CIA supplied
his regime for years, Iran -- which the CIA supplied, that's what the
Iran-Contra scandal was about -- with the CIA basically trading weapons
with our nation's central enemy and the idea that they are under the
table, betraying American interests, taking tax dollars to do it,
destabilizing our international relations is the short answer to why
they hate us -- to the extent anyone hates us -- is the CIA. It's three
letters. It's not that long. And I think it's very unfortunate that we
see in ISIS the recreation of this pattern of the CIA's complicity with
people who have been our enemies, will be our enemies, are allied with
people who are currently our enemies[.]